At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

September 01, 2016

(++++) BOOK BOOKS

The Most Frightening Story Ever
Told. By Philip Kerr. Knopf. $16.99.

The Library, Book 1: Curse of the
Boggin. By D.J. MacHale. Random House. $16.99.

There is something
irresistible about making books themselves the subject of books – yes, it is
self-referential to have books about books, but given the wealth of information
in books and the diversity of places to which books can transport readers, these
ink-on-paper volumes provide innumerable gateways through which authors can
neatly escort their followers (and incidentally, ebooks would work as well, in
the right context). There have been some excellent books about books written
recently for young readers, notably Chris Grabenstein’s Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, but there has very rarely
been a book about books as clever, twisted, erudite and surprisingly amusing as
Philip Kerr’s The Most Frightening Story
Ever Told. For one thing, Kerr, like Charles Dickens, knows that naming
characters properly conveys a great deal about them and about a book’s
atmosphere. So in addition to protagonist Billy Shivers and bookstore
proprietor Rexford Rapscallion, Kerr invents characters named Mr. Stoker (as in
Bram), Miss Maupassant (as in Guy de), Fedora Dirtbag, Michael Mucus, Wilbur
Dogbreath, Lloyd Sputum, Mercedes McBatty, Victor Creap, Loren Gytis, and many
others. Even a character with an ordinary name, such as lawyer, financier and
shampoo salesman Hugh Crane, is carefully portrayed: Crane dislikes boys
because “they laughed at stupid jokes and they kept their hands in their
pockets, and they ate potato chips in shops, and they didn’t blow their noses,
and they mumbled when they were spoken to,” and also because “any boy worth his
salt will usually find ways to avoid having his hair washed more than once a
month. If at all.” Oh, and “Billy thought it odd that Mr. Crane wanted to sell
shampoo, because he was as bald as an ostrich egg.” Then there is Mr.
Rapscallion’s daughter, Altaira, named after a character in the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, who is estranged from
her father and prefers movies of a different sort, having taken to calling
herself Redford. And there are other film-industry-named characters here, too,
including Miss Bertolucci and Mr. Brando. And the town where most of the action
takes place is called Hitchcock, which leads to a newspaper headline, surely
intended to be understood only by adults and pulsing with double meaning, which
reads, “HITCHCOCK BLONDE GOES PSYCHO IN THE SHOWER.”

But it is literary
references that really abound. Kerr’s book is itself a 200th-anniversray
tribute to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
although not explicitly presented as such. Indeed, the bookishness of The Most Frightening Story Ever Told, while
pervasive, is for the most part wonderfully subtle, as when Mr. Rapscallion
offers a Bram Stoker book to Mr. Crane – not Dracula, which would be the obvious pick, but The Lair of the White Worm, which it is a safe bet that very few
young readers of Kerr’s book will know. Indeed, one of the delights of this
book is how it tempts readers to check out other books and various authors.
There is, for example, an extended tale-within-the-tale here, allegedly written
by a very young Edgar Allan Poe, all about a 12-year-old boy’s determination to
be temporarily buried alive so as to learn what death is really like. Billy,
who is preoccupied with books because of the aftereffects of a car accident
that he barely remembers but in which he was seriously hurt, becomes
increasingly involved with Mr. Rapscallion and The Haunted House of Books, the
store that Mr. Rapscallion owns and that is on the verge of bankruptcy – like
independent booksellers in general, Kerr notes in one of many nods to the real
world. There is nothing unusual about a preteen protagonist encountering a
father figure and mentor, as happens here, but Kerr’s cast of characters is so
attractive and the form of the book’s presentation is so unusual that the commonplace
elements of the novel fade into insignificance – at a couple of points, for
example, Mr. Rapscallion sings and plays his own songs on the piano, the first
time offering an extended one he has written about how awful it is that modern
children eschew books and reading and prefer life in front of screens (phone,
computer, TV, what-have-you). Mr. Rapscallion is unusual in many ways: for
instance, he needs to have a cash register whose drawer opens with enough force
to knock him down, because he sometimes gets caught in an endless loop of
numerical calculations and cannot stop himself from doing ever-more-complicated
things with numbers unless he gets a physical shock. And his bookstore itself
is a marvelous combination, as the owner explains to Billy: “You see, when I
was a boy, not much older than you, I loved four
things. I loved doing magic tricks, I loved practical jokes, I loved old horror
movies and I loved reading. And I couldn’t make up my mind which of these four things I loved more, and to which
of those four activities I wanted to devote my life when I was a grown-up. So I
decided to do them all, and to combine professional magic and practical jokes
with my enjoyment of books and horror movies. Hence this shop.” And what a shop
it is – yet it is far from the only setting in which amazing things happen to
Billy and, by extension, to readers. Indeed, The Most Frightening Story Ever Told is so good, so varied, so
involving, so adeptly written and so daintily touched with real-world elements
(such as a Houdini story set in Kansas City, to which Billy and Mr. Rapscallion
go for a convention of nearly bankrupt booksellers) that its happy ending is a
real shame, because enthralled readers will find they could easily have lived
with these characters for hundreds of pages more.

No such issues will trouble
readers at the end of Curse of the
Boggin, because D.J. MacHale clearly identifies this book from the
beginning as the first in a series called The
Library. Alas, this is a much lesser book than Kerr’s, but its fast pace,
obvious scares and two-dimensional characters certainly go down more easily
than the complexity of the people and events in The Most Frightening Story Ever Told. And MacHale’s series can very
easily be open-ended, because the idea here is that there exists an
otherworldly library where people’s unfinished real-world stories stay until
they can be finished and properly shelved, and an occasional person from the
real world is needed as an interface with the supernatural book repository, to
aid in completing all the unfinished business that prevents the words “The End”
from appearing in many people’s “life books” (which is what they are, not that
there are called that). Once readers finish Curse
of the Boggin, which sets up the basic premise of the Library, MacHale can
create as many books as he wants in the series, and they will be readable in
any order, since each will deal with an unfinished “life book” of some sort
that the three preteen protagonists will have to finish.

About those protagonists:
the primary one is named Marcus O’Mara, and he is adopted, which is a linchpin
of the plot. As for the other two – well, narrator Marcus sketches them quickly
and clearly: “We were like three pieces of a very odd puzzle. Between Theo
[McLean], a black guy who looked as though he should be rubbing elbows at a
yacht club; [Annabella] Lu, with her Asian roller-derby-girl look, black
tights, plaid shirts, and bold makeup; and me, a white guy who wore the same
jeans and T-shirts every day until they were so stiff, they could stand up in
the corner, we looked like the cast of some kids’ show trying to cover all its
ethnic bases. It would be a grand slam if we had a Hispanic friend. Or maybe a
Tongan.” Those might show up in later books, because actually, this passage is
MacHale’s sly notice that he is
trying to cover all the required contemporary bases of identifiable multiethnic
characters – oh, and Lu is athletic and intense while Theo is highly
intellectual and scientific and does not initially believe in the supernatural,
while Marcus fits right in the middle, as usual in books like this. In fact,
there are a lot of books like Curse of the Boggin, in which the title
character is a fear-generating spirit created by the Druids that got out of
hand and has roamed the world causing frights of all sorts for thousands of
years, except when imprisoned somewhere that is sealed with copper. The Boggin
wants to destroy the Library for no particularly good reason, and the intrepid
kids need to prevent her (the Boggin usually takes the form of an old woman)
from getting the Key that would give her Library access; they must also find a
way to get her back in the box from which she escaped in some manner that may
be explained in a future book. Ah yes, the Key: Marcus first encounters the
Boggin as an old lady demanding that he “surrender the key,” which at that
point he does not even know about. Somehow, scaring Marcus out of his wits
about something with which he is completely unfamiliar furthers the Boggin’s
nefarious aims, although it makes no sense whatsoever – maybe she has scared
herself out of her own wits over the centuries. MacHale serves up some pretty
good frights from time to time in Curse
of the Boggin, most notably one involving a tree growing next to Theo’s
house. But this (+++) book never really goes anywhere surprising or varies its
straightforward bold-group-of-kids-vs.-a-monster plot in any significant way.
MacHale’s skillful pacing and the well-done spacing out of the scares are the
main attractions here. Kids attracted by those elements will be looking forward
to their next trip to the Library.